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..........In addition to this the blockade was beginning to be seriously
felt. Store coffee had well nigh vanished from the land; homespun
clothes, and homemade shoes was all that was obtainable. There was
but few sheep in the South at that time, and woolen clothing was an article
for the rich only. The country was flooded with a currency that had
depreciated steadily, and rapidly since its introduction, and nothing but
the wholesome dread of the powers that were, induced people to part with
their property, for any amount of it. Pony horses now were selling
at one to two thousand dollars. Flour was somewhere in the neighborhood
of $100 per barrel as there was no flour mills in our section we ate no
flour from that time on.
But the most serious ill convenience however, that was felt was salt,
having by our civilization been accustomed to a free and all most unlimited
supply; to be suddenly cut off without a grain, was a situation that can
be imagined, but not realized only by experience. It is true the
South had a long coast line where unlimited quantities might have been
manufactured (and it was done later on) we had no arrangements of making
it, and iron mind you at this time was as scarce as hens teeth. There
was no persons among us that understood the manufacture of it, and last
but not least, was a dread of Yankee gun boats for while according to reports,
our army had uniformly been successful on land; we had invariable been
worsted where they could get at us with those invulnerable monsters, and
the idea of setting up an industry right under the nose of the United States
Navy was something we did not do until forced to do so. But the salt
was gone and it meant we had to either have some, or quit eating, the one
looked like an impossibility, while the other was a dreadful alternative.
About this time some inventive person discovered that by taking up the
dirt out of the meat houses, and leaching it a fair article of salt could
be made: this he published for the good of suffering humanity. Next
day all hands went to work, erecting hoppers to leach the earth in, and
improvising furnaces for the evaporation of the water after it had leached
out the precious property, late in the evening we took a small run off,
the product of which was about one gallon of I hardly know what to call
it, it looked much more like mud than salt; but it was salty any how.
The water leached abundance of other matter out of the meat house soil
besides
salt, but for the sake of what little salt there was in it we manufactured
several bushels of it; and that winter 1862-63 we saved our pork with it.
A piece of pork liberally smeared with it had the appearance of being wallowed
in the mud. But even a new danger confronted us; the supply of dirt
was limited, in fact it was all utilized the first season. So at
the dawn of 1863 the prospect of a Salt famine added gravity to the already
grave situation.
However the people with the true spirit if American enterprise addressed
themselves to the situation and before hogs was slaughtered the next season
all the available marsh lands on the coast was one vast salt works, and
you could get all the salt you wanted at fifteen dollars a bushel, by hauling
it nearly one hundred miles.
The salt works was unique affairs and many interesting chapters could
be written about them what kinds of vessels was used for evaporating the
brine which included every conceivable iron vessel from a dinner pot, to
an engine boiler split in halfes (sic) each half being converted into an
open kettle; how they worked in continual expectation of gales, high tides
and Yankees. Nor arrangements for storing was made any where on the
coast for the obvious reason it would only have been an invitation to the
Marines to come out, and destroy it, which invitation they would have been
quick in accepting.
They would occasionally come out and turn out the kettles, and knock
holes in them for miles up and down the works. These same vessels
would be patched and plugged, and made to do service until they came out
again, and broke them into little bits of pieces. Sometime a gale
would come up and flood the works when they would have to flee to save
their lives such an occurrence in the night always resulted in great loss
of property for besides dissolving great quantities of salt, tearing up
furnaces, carrying off quantities of wood, frequently carried away all
their provision, feed, and camp equipments.
For all this there was a peculiar fascination in “making salt” that
caused some to follow it during the war. I might add that one of
the principle charms of the salt works was that it was too near the Yankee
gun boats for enrolling officers (Conscription Officers) to be meddlesome
as they was making them selves in the interior. To a good many they
was making life a burden by threatening and pretending they was going to
send them off. Of course they were not subject to the conscription
act but they knew that the Government hated to lose the opportunity of
an able bodied man even though he was over age; so you see the grounds
for such worriement.
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